Leadership
Mark Greenblatt
Executive Producer, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and Professor of Practice
Greenblatt is a three-time Peabody award-winner who teaches how to report and collaborate on high-impact multimedia investigations. Prior to joining the Cronkite School he worked as senior national investigative correspondent in Washington D.C. for Scripps News, where for more than a decade he led investigations and mentored early-career journalists. Greenblatt’s reports have earned the duPont-Columbia Award, the IRE Medal, the Livingston Award, multiple national Edward R. Murrow Awards, two Sigma Delta Chi Awards, the national Emmy for investigative reporting and he has twice been named a finalist for Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize (and has served on its five-member jury). He currently serves as the elected Treasurer and member of the Board of Directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the world’s leading investigative journalism training organization.
Lauren Mucciolo
Executive Producer, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and Professor of Practice
Documentary filmmaker Lauren Mucciolo oversees multimedia production and co-leads investigations at the Howard Center – including for “Lethal Restraint,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist in collaboration with The Associated Press. She has made more than a dozen broadcast and digital documentary films for PBS Frontline, many of which are co-productions with British broadcasters that have aired on Channel 4 and BBC’s Panorama, Storyville and current affairs series. Her most recent film is “Born Poor,” which opened Frontline’s 2025-26 season. Mucciolo is a seven-time Emmy nominee who has won two Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards, an ONA award for storytelling innovation, a SXSW Jury Prize and a Best Director prize from the Royal Television Society, among other honors. Her room-scale virtual reality film “After Solitary” was lauded for pushing VR storytelling and demonstrating the potential for VR in journalism.
Leonard Downie, Jr.
Editor At Large
Downie is the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School. He was executive editor of The Washington Post from 1991 to 2008 – during which The Post won 25 Pulitzer prizes – but spent 44 years in the Post newsroom. As deputy metro editor from 1972 to 1974, Downie helped supervise the Post’s Watergate coverage. Downie is the author of seven books, including The New Muckrakers, about investigative reporting; The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril (with Robert G. Kaiser); The News Media: What Everyone Needs to Know (with C. W. Anderson and Michael Schudson); All About the Story, a memoir about his time at The Post; and The Rules of the Game, a novel. He has also published several reports on the status of the media with the Committee to Protect Journalism, the Journalism Schools at Columbia University, and ASU’s Knight Center for the Future of News. Downie is a founder and former board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the chairman of the board of advisers of Kaiser Health News.
Dr. Battinto Batts, Jr.
Dean, Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Dr. Batts Jr. is the dean, a professor and an award-winning journalist and educator with deep experience in philanthropy and nonprofit administration. He previously served as director of journalism strategies for the Scripps Howard Foundation in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his support for investigative reporting’s future helped lead to the creation of the Howard Center.